Sixty-year-old Alexandra started out early Christmas Eve 1639 to make the day-long walk from Jamestown, Virginia, to her niece's house in Wolstenholme. She never made it. Instead, as she weaved her way through the woods, she found herself back in her hometown of Canterbury, England, just in time to become entangled with Parliament's ban on Christmas Celebrations, England's civil war, and a long-lost love. In 1982, Alexandra's journal calls to seventeen-year-old Marley Winters in her small town in the Mountains of Virginia. Dealing with her mother's illness and the problem of paying for college, the journal helps Marley find the key to her future as well as her past.